“No, Alfred, you must not touch her again. You must not do this to her! If you kill her, what will happen to you? She is not the only one to blame, believe me!”
Alfred attempted to push her aside, to free himself. But she clung to him with greater strength. She pressed her head against his neck. She kept her grip on his arms.
“Listen to me, Alfred,” she pleaded brokenly. “There is something I must tell you. Just listen for one moment and then you will understand why I did not tell you before.”
“Go away, Dorothea,” said Alfred, pushing his hand against her head.
“But you must listen to me, Alfred. I heard you ask her for his—name. If you will just wait, I will tell you myself.”
Alfred was suddenly quiet. He held Dorothea away from him. She was weeping uncontrollably. Amalie raised herself on her elbow. She cried out: “No, Dorothea, no! You must not tell him!”
Her head was swimming. Something warm and sticky was oozing over her lips and chin, something salty and sickening. Somewhere a horrible pain was beginning to strike at her.
But neither seemed to have heard her. Alfred was looking at his cousin. He held her arms in his hands. He shook her. “Tell me, Dorothea.”
“No!” pleaded Amalie. She tried to get up, but fell again. On her hands and knees, then, she began to move towards them, shaking her head from side to side. Nothing mattered but that she must stop Dorothea; she must reach her at once. The few feet of space enlarged endlessly before her; she seemed to travel leagues.
“You must listen, Alfred,” said Dorothea slowly and steadily. “It happened just after you went away. I—I saw them together. I thought it all over. I thought that perhaps if you never knew, it would be better for you. I hated them. I wanted them to suffer. But I decided to keep quiet—for your sake. For, you see, they told me that when you returned they would tell you, and that they would go away. They would tell you that they loved each other. I—I don’t know the whole plan. But we all agreed that nothing should be said that would hurt you, like this. And Alfred, you would never have known the full truth but for Dr. Hawley’s coming.” She wept again, but quietly. “I did not know that—that this had happened. And I do not think that she knew, either.”
Alfred said, almost inaudibly: “What are you trying to tell me, Dorothea?” And now he was as gray as stone.
“Dorothea!” cried Amalie. She had finally reached the woman. She grasped her dress in her weak hands.
But Dorothea apparently did not hear her or see her. She was looking only at Alfred, and he at her.
“Alfred, have mercy upon her. She tried to avoid him, but he pursued and tormented her, from the very day he came here. I—I do not believe that she intended to betray you. She ran from him at all times. But there was the day of the storm, and he contrived to return, when he knew I was away, and she must have been frightened. I—I do not know exactly. But I do not believe she plotted to betray you.”
Alfred dropped her arms, stepped back. He regarded his cousin steadfastly. “You are not trying to tell me, Dorothea—”
“Yes, Alfred.” She extended her hands to him in desperate pleading.
“Jerome,” he whispered.
Dorothea put her hands over her face.
Amalie let Dorothea’s dress slip from her grasp. She lay in a curled heap upon the floor, blind again, sinking into darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Alfred Lindsey looked about the neat bare bedroom in the Hobson farmhouse where Amalie had spent the last two years before her marriage to him.
Here, in this house, he had courted Amalie, had been refused once, twice, and then suddenly accepted on his third proposal. He knew every wall of this gray, clapboarded home, the scrubby lawns about it, the long fields and spindly woods of its twenty-five acres. He knew it, not only because of Amalie, but because he had had it scrupulously surveyed when he had been about to foreclose on Josiah Hobson.
He had not foreclosed it. The farmer had Amalie to thank for this. He had advanced loans on the coming harvest, a precarious thing to do, for Hobson was not a spectacular farmer. It was also something quite against Alfred’s cautious and judicious procedure in the case of other failing farms. There were some men, he knew, who, no matter how well versed in farming or how tied to the soil, were, for some mysterious reason, unable to produce good crops or were dogged by unremitting failure. However, after his help to Hobson, the farm had suddenly prospered.
Mrs. Hobson was a neat, clean woman, and the little farmhouse was immaculate, despite her brood of children.
Here, in this room with the bare wooden walls, the low sloping ceiling, the tiny windows, the polished but uncarpeted floor, Amalie had slept, and here she would sleep again, for a little while. Alfred saw the maple spool-bed with its white cotton counterpane, fringed in white by Mrs. Hobson’s gnarled hands; he saw the small maple dresser, with its flawed mirror, the one rocking chair with its embroidered cushion. Little white curtains blew in the wet, strong breeze which came through the windows. The thick trees outside, heavy with rain, filled the dim little room with subaqueous and spectrally green gloom.
Alfred deposited Amalie’s old straw valise on the floor. Mrs. Hobson, who had asked no questions, and knew she must not ask any, bustled in meekly behind Alfred and Amalie, carrying a plain kerosene lamp. She placed it on the table, glanced timidly at Alfred and Amalie, then left the room.
Amalie removed her bonnet and shawl, and hung them on one of the nails driven into the wall, where much less than a year ago she had hung her meager wardrobe. The little lamp had dissipated the green and shadowy half-light, but it had not conquered the chill gloom of the early evening. Amalie proceeded to open her valise; she brought out the plain coarse clothing she had placed there the November before. She put the few garments in the old drawers of the dresser. She had brought nothing of what Alfred had given her, not even her wedding ring. She had worn that shabby shawl, that blue velvet bonnet, when she had gone to his uncle’s house. The dress she wore, of a rough brown cotton, had cost her two dollars only a year ago. She had thought it becoming.
Alfred watched her slow but measured movements in silence, She closed the drawer. She laid upon its top her old pathetic pincushion in the shape of a huge strawberry, her black hairbrush, her comb, her pin-tray of china dimly painted with violets. She had nothing else.
There was a door in Alfred’s mind, an iron-hot door, behind which lived Jerome Lindsey. Alfred had sealed him up there, for a while. For his own sake he would not, dared not, think of him. It was a door which in a few days he would open, but could not, just now. If he did, he might lose his mind, all sense of proportion, all sanity, or so he thought, and he was not far wrong.
However, as he looked about the room, saw the shawl and bonnet on their nails, saw the sad pathos of Amalie’s few possessions, the iron door opened a little, and something like murderous madness issued from it. To this, then, had Jerome brought Amalie, to this he had reduced her again. To this, Alfred was convinced, he meant to abandon her. No! cried Alfred in himself. No, not even if I have to kill him. He closed the door quickly, feeling the fire of it on his hands, for he had not yet decided that he must not kill Jerome, anyway. There was such disgust in him, such hatred, such repulsion and rage, that there were moments when he seemed to be disintegrating, when nothing but Jerome’s death would satisfy him.
He and Amalie had not spoken to each other again since that terrible day in their room. Whatever brief commands Alfred had had to convey to Amalie had been given through Dorothea. Until today Amalie had remained in her bedroom; Dorothea had brought her her meals in silence. Nothing had passed between the two women except Alfred’s commands. The servants saw nothing of Amalie. She lived in a shell of silence, shut off from the rest of the house. Nor had she appeared to care, thought Dorothea. She had been immured in a kind of paralyzed lethargy, sitting motionless for hours in her chair near the window, and Dorothea knew, instinctively, that she sat there during the nights also.
When Dorothea called for the trays, they were often untouched, and she was obliged to carry them away, the cold meats congealing in fat gravy, the bread icy, the teapot chill to her fingers. Dorothea made no comment on this; her face was unmoved and stern. But several times she had encountered Alfred in the hallway, and together they had looked at the trays, unspeaking, not exchanging a glance. Finally Dorothea came to the bitter conclusion that Alfred deliberately waited there, in order that he might inspect the tray. At any rate, after that searching look, he would turn away, and re-enter his own rooms, his broad but thinning face as set as steel, and as expressionless. When he joined Dorothea at mealtime, he hardly touched his own food, and would sit opposite her, in the candlelight, as if sunken in a lethargy and far abstraction similar to Amalie’s. He had never cared for “spirits,” but Dorothea, with sad disgust, saw that at the table he now drank several glasses of Mr. Lindsey’s old wine, which, however, did nothing to lift the somber and dazed fixity of his eyes.
Dorothea, her own spirit laden and almost broken by the calamity which had fallen upon her father’s house, her own heart wild with apprehension and fear, did everything she could to force a normal aspect on household affairs. She tried to infuse normality into her voice when talking briefly with the servants. She had told them that Mrs. Alfred was ill, and that nothing must disturb her. The servants obediently imitated her attitude, but she knew that they whispered and wondered among themselves. Surely, it had been impossible for them not to have heard Amalie’s cries, and her own, and Alfred’s savage and distracted voice on that hideous day. She conjectured how much they knew; then would shrug despairingly. The whole world would soon know. In the meantime, it seemed best that as little as possible should escape to the inquisitive servitors.
She noticed that Jim, Jerome’s valet, was rarely in evidence. Sometimes she thought that she saw his thin and meager form drifting far off down some corridor. But he kept out of Alfred’s sight, and this filled Dorothea with foreboding. The horrible little man, then, knew something. Would he find some way to warn Jerome? But no, that could not be. No letter could reach Jerome in time to prevent his returning.
There were so many terrors now in Dorothea’s sleepless mind. She hated her brother; she would spare no fearful thought for him. He must be justly punished. But what of her father? How much could he be spared?
She had convinced Alfred, she wearily hoped, that the less uproar, the less catastrophe, that occurred in this house, the sooner the healing, the sooner the adjustment. At least, he had listened to her with quiet politeness, looking at her with his dead and sunken eyes, but he had made no comment. As for herself, she was making no plans, and she shrank from any personal thoughts.
She hated Amalie; she was certain of this. But when she took the trays to her sister-in-law’s room, when she saw that empty bruised face and those filmed eyes, something contracted savagely in her heart, and something like virulent anger against Alfred pervaded her. He had struck and beaten a defenseless woman; he had married her face and drawn her blood. During one frightful moment, she, Dorothea, had barely been able to keep him from kicking her as she had lain at his feet. Only by sternly recalling Alfred’s provocation was she able to forgive him. For Dorothea had always been quite a “blue-stocking,” and had often furiously resented the oppression of her sex by men, the limitations of women’s opportunities, their defenselessness before the law, their often hopeless lives. She had burned with rage more than once at the memory of women she knew, whose fortunes had been arrogantly seized by new husbands, whose children had been abused by their fathers, whose relatives had been arbitrarily forbidden the houses bought by their own inheritances. They had recourse to no law; they were chattels, mere animals at the disposal of their masters.
It had frightened and repelled Dorothea that she had been able to pity Amalie; it threw her into the wildest uncertainty when she discovered that she had had to check herself, on several occasions, from speaking to Amalie with concern and sympathy. These generous impulses, born of secret and unsuspected understanding and compassion, and of indignation against men, turned, frustrated but still powerful, against her brother, Jerome. She hoped that Alfred would punish him, short of murder. But she could not be sure that Alfred, in his malignant hatred, humiliation and dishonor, would not kill Jerome. She had never suspected this side of Alfred’s nature, and it terrified her. Sometimes she looked at him wonderingly, as one looks at a baleful stranger.
Three or four dreadful days had passed, during which a kind of plague of silence seemed to have descended on the house. But Dorothea waited, knowing that Alfred was slowly but inexorably making some plan. When he finally announced to her that he was taking Amalie back to the Hobson farm her relief was almost hysterical, though she did not quite know why. She had conveyed this information briefly but coldly to Amalie, who made no reply. However, on the designated late afternoon, in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, when she went to summon her, Dorothea discovered, that Amalie was quite prepared. She was, in fact, waiting for Dorothea, sitting in her chair, clad in the poor garments in which she had come to this house, waiting supinely, submissively, silently, as if she had lost all volition of her own, all emotion, all fear and thought. It was as if she had died on that appalling day, and her body was still retaining some faint but involuntary movements, which responded automatically to the commands of others.
The servants were not visible; Dorothea had seen to that. The house, dim and silent, echoing murmurously with the rain and wind outside, seemed deserted. Alfred was waiting below, pulling on his gloves, his greatcoat buttoned against the damp chill. He had not looked directly at Amalie. But he had taken her valise from her hand, and she had weakly surrendered it to him. Dorothea watched them go, and could not understand the sick pain which weakened her.
It was wise of Alfred that he had decided to take Amalie himself, for servants gossiped. The buggy curtains were drawn; they had sat side by side for the last time. For all the notice Alfred took of her, Amalie might not have been present. He stared straight ahead, grasping the reins, guiding the horse down the flowing roadway to the valley, hearing the brush of wet branches against the top of the vehicle, smelling the cold and heavy moisture of the countryside. Whatever his thoughts, he betrayed none of them. If he was aware of the broken woman at his side, he gave no sign at all. A cool wind, penetrating through the curtains, had blown a fold of her brown dress over his thigh. He had not recoiled; he had not moved. But his muscles stiffened, held themselves tense, as if to repudiate the fabric, or, perhaps, not to disturb it.
Alfred was to remember that ride all his life, and he never remembered it without the freshness of new agony and sorrow and despair.
The Hobsons, informed briefly a few days before to expect Mrs. Lindsey, were waiting. They seethed with curiosity and speculation. But they knew Alfred too well. They would not gossip, for fear of his wrath. They would not question. It had been implied to them that to do so would mean their ruin, and because of the weather, the success of the crops was not too certain. Mrs. Lindsey, they had been told, would remain with them for a few weeks, or less, perhaps. They were to care for her but speak to her as little as possible.
And now Amalie and Alfred stood in this room, which was filled with the struggling beams of the small and odorous lamp. The curtains flapped. The air was desolate and sterile, full of grief and wretchedness. The little house was very quiet, and even the children’s voices could not be heard.
Amalie, finished with her unpacking, had seated herself in the little straight rocker. She was rocking slowly, mechanically, staring straight before her, her hands, the palms upturned in a poignant attitude of utter relinquishment and abandon, lying upon her knees. Her profile was towards Alfred. She seemed completely unaware of his presence. He saw her bruised and swollen cheek in the dusky lamplight; he saw the unblinking fixity of her eyes.
Moments went by as he stood there and listened to the wind and the rain and the faint creaking of the rocker. And then,
all at once, an explosion seemed to burst in his heart, an explosion of agony and sorrow and passion and love. He knew now, that whatever happened, that no matter how ruthlessly he had been dishonored and betrayed, he would never forget Amalie, never cease to love and desire her. And never would he be able to overcome his remorse; never would he forget his sudden and terrible desire, now, to take her in his arms, to kiss her bruised cheek and poor lips, to weep out his plea for forgiveness, to urge her to let him send her away until this horror was over and then to let him bring her back to his love and protection.
The force of his own emotions staggered him, made him feel faint and ill. He forced himself to retreat from her, to turn away his eyes from her. With hands that trembled violently, he laid a heap of gold and silver money on the dresser. Whether or not she heard the jingling, he could not tell. At least, from what he saw of her in the dresser mirror, moving slowly back and forth in her chair, her expression did not change.
He turned away from the dresser. There was nothing to keep him here now. But still, he could not leave. He looked steadily at his wife.
I must go, he thought. But he did not move. The wind and the rain grew stronger. The lamp flickered. And still Amalie rocked, as if under some hypnotic spell. Was she waiting for him to speak? He thought not. He believed she was not conscious of him at all, but was lying at the bottom of some awful pit, senseless, moving only feebly.
And then he said, hoarsely: “I am leaving you some money. I believe you have agreed to remain in this house until after the divorce. I believe you understand that this is the one thing you can do for me, the last thing.”
Amalie’s white lips moved. She said: “Yes.” But she did not glance at him, nor pause in her rocking.
Again there was only the sound of the wind and the rain in that miserable little room. He was leaving her here, now, in this chill and dampness, in this poverty and abandonment. His throat tightened; he thrust his fists into his pockets.